


Derek Hale, Human

by saltslimes



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Angst, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Gen, Human!Derek, Hurt/Comfort, episode 4x05
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-24
Updated: 2014-07-24
Packaged: 2018-02-10 05:17:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,000
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2012388
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/saltslimes/pseuds/saltslimes
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Derek has never wanted to be anything but a werewolf. And Scott doesn't really understand, but he kind of tries.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Derek Hale, Human

Losing his power is not an immediate thing. It happens gradually, but when it’s finally gone, when he is… human, or something close to it, it doesn’t feel like he expected. Not at first. It doesn’t feel like some connection to his past has been severed. At first, it feels like a lunar eclipse, like he has simply been cut off from his power. But then, it begins to feel like he is peeling away from his body, leaving it behind. Like he has stepped outside of who he used to be, and he isn’t sure if he can go back.

When Scott and his friends destroyed the nogistune it was by changing its body, so it couldn’t remain. Derek feels like that. He feels like it is his body that has been irreparably changed, so much so that he can not longer fit inside his own skin.

Finally, he feels weighted. His limbs are heavier than they have ever been. He finds his chest growing tighter with every breath he takes, every beat of his new weak heart. It feels as if he is drowning. But this time there is no surface to break, no air to be found. He is just drowning.

He spills hot coffee on himself and the mark lasts for days. He keeps finding his fingers running over it, the faded pain so novel and strange. He is not used to scabs, because he has never had any. Lifting things is a sudden game of surprise. Boxes in the loft that felt like nothing before slip from his fingers and go crashing to the floor, too heavy for him to hold once pulled off the shelf. But it’s the silence that really gets to him. He lies awake at night and where once he could hear the whole of beacon hills thrumming with electricity, with quiet life, he hears nothing. He hears the fan struggling on its last legs. He hears the clink of pipes settling in the ancient building. And nothing else.

When he goes home from a fight he really had no right to be in, really didn’t help at all with, he finds his hands shaking. The blood does not stop, and it won’t he knows, unless he does something about it. But instead, he walks to the window of his empty loft, and he sits on the floor looking out at the night. The full moon is hung in the sky. Derek looks at it and feels nothing. His senses are swathed in cotton. There are no howls, no heartbeats, no scents to catch. The world, at least for him, has gone silent. And then comes a noise that even he can hear. It’s someone sliding the door open, and stepping down, into the room.

He has to look around to see who it is, and when he does, he’s actually surprised. It’s not Peter, arriving home like he expected, but Scott, shirt covered in blood from the fight, but the skin under the rips and tears smooth and unblemished. He’s come such a long way from the stubborn, shocked beta he was. And Derek has come a long way too, if he thinks about it. He went from beta to alpha to this… nothing. He’s not human. He can never be human, he thinks, because he wasn’t born human. So without the wolf he’s just… nothing.

He almost expects Scott to say something, make a joke, maybe, but it’s Stiles, not Scott, who always has something to say. It’s almost funny that there was a time Derek might have confused them, dopey teens #1 and 2. Funniest though has to be the joke that the universe has been playing on Derek. Someone, he thinks, has to be laughing. Because if not, what was even the point of it all?

Scott just sits down beside him, and in the silence that falls, neither of them moving or speaking, Derek can pick out his breathing. He can’t hear the sound the blood soaking in his pants, and he can’t heart Scott’s heartbeat, only his own, thudding dully in his ears. But he can pick out Scott’s every breath, and he takes a kind of weak pride in that.

“Stiles is human, and he doesn’t mean any less to us. He’s not… worth less,” Scott finally says. He wouldn’t come without something to say, Derek thinks.  
“I’m not human,” is what he says.

“I meant he doesn’t—I meant… there is still room in my pack, since I have a pack, for everyone. Not just werewolves.”

I am a werewolf, Derek wants to say, because he is, he always has been, you cannot have Derek without the werewolf part, he cannot look in the mirror and think, Derek Hale, human. Instead, he says nothing. Scott looks at the floor. Then he slides over so they are close enough to touch, and he wraps and arm around Derek’s shoulder. And his arm is so heavy that maybe it tugs at a muscle Derek has pulled because he feels hotness sting his face, tears well in his eyes. It’s something else to be turned inside out. To feel your bones stretch back to adult size in a matter of moments and realize that you have not been yourself, that you have somehow been missing.

It’s something else to have just come back to your own mind and body and suddenly find that something has been taken from you and that you are steadily losing something else, draining away like sand in an hourglass.

Scott’s hand tightens on the shoulder of Derek’s shirt, and he wonders if maybe the obtuse, bold declaration he made when he first met Scott rings true now, at least to some degree. If they really are brothers in some sense.

“You should probably come to the hospital and my mom can look at that,” Scott says when he stands up, pointing to where Derek is still bleeding. And that’s answer enough.

**Author's Note:**

> 1000 words exactly can't say no to that. I was super sad there were no reaction fics to the end of episode five so I wrote one up myself and I'm so that it is excessively angsty.


End file.
